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Courtney Love Melts Down at D.C. Club Show

Watch footage of the Hole singer's bizarre performance

Courtney Love's recent Behind the Music special covered the wild and turbulent career of the Hole singer, but Love added another strange and unexpected chapter to her life story with perhaps her biggest in-concert meltdown yet. According to the Washington Post , Love's recent performance at D.C.'s 9:30 Club disintegrated into a three-hour train wreck highlighted by strange between-song stage banter, attacks at her critics, endless celebrity name-checking and, by the show's end, Love stripping down topless to perform the encore. "Do you really like rock music?" Love asked one young woman earnestly during the show. "Because you're African American. That would be like me being into Lil Wayne." Check out footage of Love's bizarre performance (plus fans' post-show reactions) below.

Hole performed roughly 30 songs, including covers of songs by the Rolling Stones and Leonard Cohen, but the songs were mainly just fragments and only a handful were actually completed. During performances of "Miss World" and "Violet," Love turned her back to the microphone during the chorus. She also stumbled through several other songs, admitting that she had forgotten how to play them — yet still played them regardless. "This is a really weird show," Love said. "I can't tell if it's really terrible." Later, one of her handlers announced that in order to coax Love back for an encore, the crowd would have to cheer loudly because, the Post reports, "there was someone who was waiting to have sex with Love and it would take lots of applause to get her to delay that appointment."

Love has had a string of recent meltdowns surrounding the release of Nobody's Daughter. As Rolling Stone previously reported, Love kicked off the promotional campaign by igniting a Twitter war with both Billy Corgan — who accused Love of using a pair of songs he'd co-written on her new album without his permission — and her own daughter Frances Bean, who opted to live with her grandmother instead of Love. However, after performing what Love described as the "worst show" of her career at SXSW this March, she eloquently chatted with the hosts of The View and on the Howard Stern Show and the concerts leading up to the Washington, D.C. debacle were incident-free.